jwilzewske: One World, Different Dreams: Olympian Virtuosity and Performance Psychology

T he [Dürer Melancolia I] engraving is auto-reflective; it presents the creative person confronting the limitations of his/her art.”
— Henry Majewski, Brown University.

T he Melancolia engraving thus seems to articulate a pivotal moment in the cultural history of subjectivity. Where the Middle Ages substantialized inwardness as [evidence of] the deadly sin of acedia [moral sloth], the Renaissance abstracted inwardness as an inherent quality of creative genius and valorized its effects in the originality of the artist, whose works are wholly his own.”
— Joseph Leo Koerner, Courtauld Institute of Art.

About 500 years ago, Albrecht Dürer began making pictures of people. The more Dürer studied human beauty, the more he felt stymied by it: ‘Beauty: I cannot know what it is; it is dependent on so many things.’ His work entitled ‘Melancholy’ is ambivalent, not about beauty but about the outcome of human striving for material achievement and perfection.

Or, maybe more accurately, the engraving asserts that striving and mastering and winning are not sufficient to insure a meaningful life and happiness.

The figure has wings, denoting the power to do super-human things. From her belt hang keys and a money bag, symbolizing power and wealth. She is surrounded by measuring instruments, to evaluate performance and plan future designs and accomplishments. She has at her disposal a panel of ‘magic’ numbers (gematria-like or sudoku-like, they add up to 34 in all directions). At her feet are engineering tools that offer mastery over the physical world. And yet the figure is alone, melancholic. This engraving is one of the most enigmatic pieces in art history, with an extensive literature surrounding its interpretation.

This Dürer engraving is not about recovering from defeat or depression—to a restored state of ‘normal’. The piece is about finding the elusive meaning and value that one is striving for, from a position of Olympian mastery and elite-level virtuosity.

There are a variety of ‘psychology of sport’ texts that offer insights on this (see links below) that are as relevant and useful to classical musicians as they are to elite athletes. Roland Carlstedt’s book summarizes a number of intriguing monitoring techniques and results in the sports-medicine cardiac electrophysiology research literature—for example, quantitative short-term heart rate variability and heart rate decrease prior to commencing a difficult passage (see pp. 115ff)—that could be used for selecting and training top musicians, just as they are used for selecting and training top athletes.

T he Olympics are as much about politics as they are about sport, notwithstanding frequent calls not to ‘politicize’ the Olympics that come from top officials of the International Olympic Committee, the Beijing Games’ hosts and even a U.S. administration that has faced growing criticism for President Bush’s early commitment to attend the opening ceremonies. China’s leaders’ … official narrative also includes a very different, strongly nationalist strand—one that risks, and with the torch relay has produced, friction abroad.”
— Jacques deLisle, Owning the Olympics.

In competitive games, one player (or team) seeks to outperform another by undertaking various physical and communicative and psychological moves—not unlike conversations. Games have distinct ‘narrative’ structures, analogous in many cases to the narrative structure of myths. That are enacted by each participant to express the ‘self’ that the participant wishes to be and to project its associated emotions. These plays of the self enable each participant to seek heroic moments. Going beyond the myth-making that may be achieved by individuals, it’s clear that performance has different meanings in different societies, as means of promoting specific ideologies of a society and social ideals. Virtuosic music performance and virtuosic athletic performance are similar in this respect.

B ecause of the centrality of China and narratives of China in the global and domestic imagination, the stakes in producing and controlling the stories produced through the Beijing Olympics have been great. Through this, the event has become something of a watershed for altering perceptions and engendering change.”
— Monroe Price, Owning the Olympics.

Games, unlike other narrative idioms, are unique in providing a context where the emotions associated with winning or losing happen in quick succession—each moment leads to a climax. Each individual player engages others emotionally and cognitively. But, although the engagement temporarily offsets any sense of ‘aloneness’ in the world, the context is still one of continual, relentless loneliness in the striving to be best, striving to be good enough to remain on the team, among the elite.

Each individual athlete/musician performer anticipates the future and faces not only the prospect of sudden reward but also the prospect of sudden disappointment if the events do not turn out well.

Each individual athlete/musician performer also feels the weight of duties that world-class prowess entails—duties that inhere in the lucky endowment of the individual with extraordinary abilities; duties that arise from the investments and sacrifices that others have made toward that individual’s long training, to successfully reach and sustain the elite level of performance.

T he commonalities in the presentational rhetoric of the Beijing and London [Olympics] bids are striking. The [U.K.] video ‘Full Moon’ (2005), was divided into three parts, the first and the third entitled ‘Inspiration,’ and the middle section comprising Tony Blair’s address to the IOC... The voiceover stressed the nobility and potentially heroic aspiration of the athlete in the familiar tones of Lord of the Rings mega-star Sir Ian McKellan. His voice was framed against an original score that blended the elegiac feel of English classical music with a Vangelis-style sound redolent of the ‘Chariots of Fire’ anthem that has come to embody the theme of heroic human striving... ‘Choose London and inspire young people everywhere to choose Olympic sport!’ There is a marked consistency of the messages transmitted [by Beijing and by London]: youth, aspiration, and the future are at the center of the frame. Prominently absent from both is the actual fact of Olympic finances... If there is a convergence between the aims and values of Olympism and those of contemporary capitalism, then these are at most a subtext in the representational devices and strategies of aspiring Olympic hosts.”
— Alan Tomlinson, Owning the Olympics.

Look once more at Dürer’s brooding figure, posed in an attitude of frustration, with a downward gaze. Isn’t each individual Olympic athlete and each individual classical music artist also like Dürer’s melancholic alchemist, searching for the elusive Stone—a seeker after power and wisdom and social acclaim, endowed with extraordinary abilities, but also heavily weighed down by duties? Isn’t this a mood not so much of temporary defeat as of existential pain and duty-boundness? The atmosphere of incomplete personhood and diminished freedom is intensified by the tolling bell and the anorexic, indolent dog. Despite the keys and the magic numbers and the light-giving lamp, and notwithstanding the fact that knowledge and victory do come, full-fledged freedom and fulfillment are nowhere in sight. The weight of the obligations and expectations is enormous. The discipline and asceticism that elite performers exert in order to achieve what they do comes at this terrific price, personally and socially.

W hat is Below is like that which is Above; and what is Above is like that which is Below, to accomplish the miracles of One Thing.”
— The Second Precept of Alchemy, the Emerald Tablet; symbolized by the rolling sphere, hoop, or grindstone in Dürer’s Melancolia I.

Healthy sports psychology for serious athletes and healthy performance psychology for serious musicians are both fundamentally concerned with coping with these chronic, pervasive tensions. For whatever interest they may have for you in your own musicianship and coping, here are a few useful books (links below).

Olympic Village, 05-AUG-2008, Photo: Zhang Guojun, Xinhua

T his is modern China. It is not what we imagined it would be when Richard Nixon wrote forty years ago that we should not leave China ‘forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, and threaten its neighbors,’ and started us down the path of engagement. When we wondered all these years whether China would modernize or not, Westernize or not, become civilized or not, we were asking the wrong questions, making the wrong distinctions. What we got instead is a China that is both proud and resentful; open and closed; like us—yet not at all like us.”
— Andrew Nathan, Medals & Rights, The New Republic.

jwilzewske

Thursday, August 14, 2008

One World, Different Dreams: Olympian Virtuosity and Performance Psychology

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